> I doubt that any recommendation system is capable of providing meaningful results in absence of the "awareness" about the actual content (be it music, books, movies or anything else) of what it's meant to recommend.
Most of the reasons people like music, or fictional movies and books, is personal, emotional, subjective, and difficult to articulate. You wouldn't know what data to collect. You're better off just asking them to rate song, movies, or novels out of ten. You can then compare their ratings with other people's, and what you'll find is there are clusters of people who rate things similarly (and others who rate things differently), and that the ratings they give overall somehow capture their feelings about whatever they listened to, watched, or read. (Source: I developed a movie recommendation system which predicted ratings reasonably accurately.)
Of course, if you just have sequences of user actions, like in the article, your recommendations won't be anywhere near as accurate.
Most of the reasons people like music, or fictional movies and books, is personal, emotional, subjective, and difficult to articulate. You wouldn't know what data to collect. You're better off just asking them to rate song, movies, or novels out of ten. You can then compare their ratings with other people's, and what you'll find is there are clusters of people who rate things similarly (and others who rate things differently), and that the ratings they give overall somehow capture their feelings about whatever they listened to, watched, or read. (Source: I developed a movie recommendation system which predicted ratings reasonably accurately.)
Of course, if you just have sequences of user actions, like in the article, your recommendations won't be anywhere near as accurate.